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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Yes, the biggest Soviet killings would have been the Holodomor, Kazakh famine, ethnic campaigns and the Great Purge, the three first of which mainly implicitly or explicitly targeted other ethnicities than Russians (unless one is Great-Russian enough in mentality to just consider Ukrainians to be funny-speaking Russians) and the last targetting communists of all ethnicities.

With regard to the so-called ethnic campaigns I think it's necessary to point out that the ethnic minorities who were targeted (in a loose sense) in the purges all had ethnic homelands of their own which bordered the USSR and were either hostile states, former wartime adversaries like Poland or Finland, or colonized by a hostile state, such as Korea under Japanese rule. While this was never expressed officially, the purges and terror waves targeted individuals with any ties abroad, no matter how insignificant, because the regime accused foreign governments of secretly plotting to overthrow the Soviet system with the assistance of recruited internal wreckers, spies, traitors, terrorists etc. It is for this reason that Korean, Latvian, Polish etc. minorities were hugely overrepresented among the victims of state terror, not because the regime wanted to stick it to non-Russians as such.

With regard to the so-called ethnic campaigns I think it's necessary to point out that the ethnic minorities who were targeted (in a loose sense) in the purges all had ethnic homelands of their own which bordered the USSR and were either hostile states, former wartime adversaries like Poland or Finland, or colonized by a hostile state, such as Korea under Japanese rule.

It's very hard, without large scale immigration (either of you versus the equivalent of the native Americans, or of the minorities), to be in a situation where your country's ethnic minorities are not one of those.

Also, by this standard, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the US wouldn't count as anti-ethnic because the US was at war with Japan.

It would though. Not because of the state of war, but because all people of Japanese ancestry under US government, with or without US citizenship, were interned. In contrast, the ethnic operations of the NKVD during the Great Purge did not target nationalities as a whole, with the exception of Koreans. The Soviet forced resettlement of 'traitor' minorities in wartime, however, did.

Holodomor, Kazakh famine which mainly implicitly or explicitly targeted other ethnicities than Russians

At least million and a half of Russians died in this collectivization caused famine, among them my great grandfather. That's so insane that post-soviet nationalists successfully reframed this tragedy caused by communist ideology, engineered by Georgian head of state and turned into reality by local ethnic party bureaucrats(orders related to Holodomor were written in Ukrainian after all) into genocide done by imperialistic evil Russians against minorities, at least in the minds of Western public.

The more common Western opinion (if they have heard of the holodomor at all) is that it was caused by communism. That said, the only people who really discuss it are either American libertarians/conservatives or generic neoliberal NATOwave type Central Europeans who vote center-right and see Russia and communism as essentially the same thing.

Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the European Parliament with 507 votes for (and 12 votes against). Even a plurality of the far-left group GUE/NGL voted for it.

There's an obvious political motive to this. From a casual scanning of the academic literature historians generally do not consider the Holodomor a genocide (but this doesn't really change the moral aspect of it much).

Obviously, the point being that Holodomor is not that obscure a thing, particularly after 2022, and it's not just people broadly on the right who care about it.

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